Not again, Street

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Since there are no fewer than 10 to the 24th bytes of possible political, social, and cultural data that can be mined for instant meaning analysis and humdrum pedantry, there should be no need for repetition here, at the home of the nihilists against the overlords. Yet Paul Street, the self-advertised “fiercest critic,” is running up world-class word counts at Coutnerpunch, now being the resident skeptic about the cult of Bernie Sanders. Good on that note, fine, hammer away at the F-35 loving hawk and saintly curmudegeon of the well-compensated no-weight “politician,” but then Street jsut can’t acept being tarred as a “pessimist.”

He has to announce, after the chapter and verse of denunciation of the Bernie sectarians, that he is not a pessimist, at all. Instead, after a lot of bafflegab, here’s the Streetian rejoinder to his critics of his criticalness:

There’s a deeper and actually optimistic logic here, one that places far greater significance on the longer term ground game of grassroots organizing…

Ah, that old hopey change blarney, preposterously labeled as “grassroots organizing.” The world, being run by giant multinationals as part of a encircling supersystem, will be made to re-order as a “people’s revolution” by some neighborhood leafletting. Sure – that’s how this whole world changes, and has changed, by butt-sitting petitioning. There should be nothing but “optimism” about that non-existent trendlet, right? We the People get all exercised about some injustice in common, or maybe two, and we all get together and march on Park Place and Google headquarters and hit some drums and the pain of a G20 world of rampaging industrial extraction and destruction will just slide away, peaceful-like, leaving us to wear soft shoes and plant daisies in each others’ hair?

That’s the “optimistic logic” of – well, let’s pull back from an epithet, and allow that he is but one cranial holder of a bunch of tangled neurons predicated on the lie of imminent success.